Mystery of 'Vampire' Burials Solved

Below:

Next story in Science

The mystery behind several "vampire" burials in Poland has been
solved.

People who were buried with sickles (curved, sharp farming
knives) around their necks, or rocks at their jaws, to
prevent their corpses from reanimating were natives to the
area in which they were buried, according to a new study.

Tales of the dead coming back to life have truly ancient roots,
going back to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians and
beyond, said study co-author Tracy Betsinger, a bioarchaeologist
at the State University of New York at Oneonta.

For all these stories of the dead coming back to life, "the word
collectively used is a 'revenance,'" Betsinger told Live Science.

Tales
of vampires have circulated in Eastern Europe since at least
the 11th century, and newspaper accounts have described alleged
vampires since the 17th century. For instance, in 1725, an
Austrian official recounted the story of Serbian peasant Petar
Blagojevic, who was said to have killed nine villagers in his
area before people staked him through his heart. Vampire lore at
this time didn't require blood sucking as an integral feature;
instead, the undead could slay living people with just a glance.

In ancient lore, a person was at risk of becoming a vampire after
death if he or she was unbaptized, died a violent death, was the
first one killed in an epidemic or was an outsider from another
local, Gregoricka said.

Notions that vampires drank blood may have arisen during
plagues and epidemics, when corpses would often lie exposed
and decomposing for long periods of time.

"People were up close and personal with death at this point, but
didn't have a good way to explain what was happening," Gregoricka
told Live Science.

For instance, the body
tends to bloat after death from bacterial-produced gases.
This pressure in the lower body, in turn, forces blood up from
the lungs, into the esophagus and then through the mouth, which
may have led villagers to believe the corpse of a person who was
waiflike and frail during life was fat from feasting on blood,
she said.

Vampire burial

Gregoricka and her colleagues analyzed bone fragments from the
Drawsko cemetery, a Polish site where vampire burials were found.
The cemetery dates from the 17th to the 18th century, the
researchers said. Some people at the site were buried with
sickles under their necks or rocks under their jaws, to prevent
them from reanimating. (The sickles were intended to decapitate
the people if they tried to rise from the grave, while the rocks
pinned their jaws shut so they weren't able to feed on the
living, Gregoricka said.)

The researchers then took a closer look at 60 of the 333 burials
from the site, six of which were
"vampire" burials intended to prevent a corpse from
reanimating. The team analyzed the ratio of strontium isotopes
(versions of the atom with different numbers of neutrons) in the
skeletons. Because each location has a unique ratio of these
isotopes, and people's bodies naturally take the elements up from
the environment, analyzing strontium isotope ratios can reveal
where a person is from.

Contrary to the initial hypothesis that the "vampires" were
immigrants, the team actually discovered that all of the vampires
were locals.

Since none of the "vampires" showed signs of a violent death or
severe trauma, the team speculates that the vampires were perhaps
the first people felled in one of the cholera epidemics that
swept the area during the time. People could die of cholera in
days or even hours, Gregoricka said.

"If something kills you very quickly, it's not going to leave a
mark on the bone," Gregoricka said.

As a follow-up, the researchers want to conduct more chemical
analyses to see if they can learn more about these villagers. The
findings were published today (Nov. 26) in the journal PLOS ONE.